World’s smallest bible is the size of a grain of sugar

The world’s smallest bible, etched on a microchip the size of a grain of sugar, has been placed on display as part of the Israel Museum’s 50th anniversary celebration.

Created by scientists at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, the Nano Bible is a gold-plated silicon chip the size of a pinhead on which the entire Hebrew Bible is engraved. The tiny bible needs to be magnified 10,000 times to be legible.

Technion scientists used a focused ion beam to carve over 1.2 million letters on the miniscule chip. “The beam dislodges gold atoms from the plating and creates letters, similar to the way the earliest inscriptions were carved in stone,” it explained, in a press release.

As part of the Jerusalem museum’s anniversary celebrations, the Nano Bible is on display in the famous institution’s Shrine of the Book, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls. “The exhibition takes the Book of Books on a journey from antiquity to the present – from the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls to the 21st-century Nano Bible,” explained the Israel Museum, on its website.

The Nano Bible will be on display in the Shrine of the Book through Dec. 31 2016.

The first of two copies of the Nano Bible were presented to Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Israel in 2009. The chip on display in the Israel Museum was produced especially for the Information and Study Center of the Shrine of the Book, according to the Technion.